TORONTO -- LinkedIn has added “stay-at-home mom” and other role titles to its public resume function in a move to better reflect high numbers of people – particularly women – who have left the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Options added this week also include “stay-at-home dad” and “stay-at-home parent," and the Microsoft-owned platform has also removed the requirement that resume entries be linked to a specific employer.
The move comes following a post on Medium’s ‘Better Marketing’ website that criticized LinkedIn’s lack of flexibility on its language as biased against women who have left the workforce.
Jobs data shows that the pandemic has hit women much harder than men. A recent report by RBC showed that nearly half a million women in Canada who lost their jobs because of the pandemic haven’t returned to work, with more than 200,000 women becoming unemployed for the long-term.
In the United States, more than 2.3 million women have left the labour force since February 2020, according to recent data.
LinkedIn is also allowing users in certain countries to add their preferred gender pronouns, the platform’s director of engineering told Reuters this week. The feature is being rolled out in Canada, the United States, Britain, Sweden and Ireland.
